Ever feel jealous of your friends? Worry that they’re happier, more fulfilled or more successful than you? Bad news, then — a new equation has found evidence of a ‘happiness paradox’, which confirms just that.
Researchers from Indiana University, New York University and Wageningen University in the Netherlands discovered the paradox when studying the similar ‘friendship paradox’. The friendship paradox states that your friends have more friends than you on social media — a statement that seems to make no real sense, but is backed up by a mathematical formula. It’s an effect, the researchers write, that “may explain recent findings that widespread social network media use leads to reduced happiness” — if your friends are more popular than you, it’s not too big a leap to think that they might be happier too.
By: Emily Reynolds,
